Famous Widows Play Restricted Role As Eerie Echoes Of The Dead

May 9, 1985|By Howard Means of the Sentinel Staff

WASHINGTON — Consider the famous, tragic widows, that spousal residue of the violence by which the world's business too often gets done. In this country alone one thinks of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ethel Kennedy and Coretta King. Nancy Reagan came much closer to joining their numbers than almost anyone realized in the first days after John Hinckley's attack on the president.

Who are the others, the ones beyond our everyday ken? Benigno Aquino left a widow, Corazon, when he was murdered as he stepped off an airplane in Manila in August 1983. But what about Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, blown up in September 1982, or the legion of other leaders and activists who have disappeared less spectacularly, in the still of the night? Did they leave wives? Families? One forgets the facts -- the acts are too common, the events too distant to hold in mind for long.

Then there is Jihan Sadat. She is 50 now, almost four years older than she was in October 1981 when Anwar Sadat was gunned down on a reviewing stand in Cairo, a few rows in front of her; and she is still stunning.

Jihan Sadat's time is divided these days between her house in Egypt, given to her for life by the Egyptian government after her husband's assassination, and this country, where she has been lecturing at the University of South Carolina and the American University in Washington. She is also working on an autobiography and a doctorate in literature with a dissertation topic suitably dry: the influence of British criticism on Egyptian criticism between the wars.

She works, too, at the press interviews such as the one she gave in Washington last week. They are an inevitable part of being a famous, tragic widow, and yet they are odd experiences because these women -- these distaff survivors of calamity -- remain in the public eye less as flesh-and-blood people than as eerie echoes of the dead.

Coretta King is Coretta King, of course, but she is more an artifact of the great social movement of nearly two decades gone by. Jackie Kennedy has a pulse, a mass, but if one thinks of her at all any more -- and without the supermarket tabloids one wouldn't be much inclined to -- it is as a symbol of a time when panache came to the nation's capital and as a kind of still life of the day in November 1963 when her reason for existing in the public eye as anything like herself was destroyed.

So it is with Jihan Sadat. She has a cause -- women's rights, especially in Egypt -- and she says that it is this she wants to be remembered for. That being the case, she is interviewed mostly by women, and her thoughts dutifully taken down and reported in the women's sections of newspapers and the softer spots on the local news broadcasts.

But at heart it is a silly business. She gets asked about ''the women's movement in Egypt,'' a subject that not one in 100,000 Americans cares about and a subject that she may, at any rate, have little power to affect. Seen by some as too flashy and too enamored of America, Jihan Sadat is not universally admired in her native land.

Meanwhile, the other questions get asked only occasionally. Does she think the Reagan administration is doing enough to support the Camp David accords that are her husband's legacy, if he is to have one, to history? ''I would love for it to be much more than that,'' she answers, ''but I don't want to impose myself. I am a guest here.''

Will another Sadat come along in the Middle East -- someone to go to Jerusalem, to make the grand gesture? ''I don't think many have this tremendous courage, this vision . . . altogether in a man like Sadat,'' she says.

Even then, the answers seem less substance than spirit. The voice that gives them appears to be reaching out of a darkness, connecting with its thin vocal strand the gun that killed her husband with the strange demi-world that these famous, tragic widows survive in. They should be put to more use somehow or allowed to be more themselves, but history has prepared a role for them and left them little choice but to play it.